


The Unquiet Dead

by peregrineroad



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Afterlives, Body Horror, Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2018-12-02 22:37:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11518938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peregrineroad/pseuds/peregrineroad
Summary: Ego the Living Planet is dead, and now the dead must deal with what power he has left.





	1. Chapter 1

_The ghost ship don't need masters 'cos its galley's full of dead;_

_No-one issues orders, still--_

_they're roaring in your head..._

 

None of Yondu's childhood companions had ever tried to have names. The Kree gave designations when a slave was assigned to a unit, and everyone in Yondu's unit had been taken too young to remember having had a previous identifier. For them, it had been the Kree characters _Sula_ and _Fra,_ followed by a number.

 _SulaFra_ 127\. That had been Yondu, once, if his life had any continuity at all from before the Flames.

Those who survived long enough were eventually sorted into new groups with more colourful descriptions: The Purax Blockaders; The Long Gunners; The Augmented Meats. Your number changed upon reassignment, so you couldn't keep track that way. 

Mostly you remembered your fellow nameless by their capacity in battle, or, if it were real ugly, by how they died. He still had a highlight reel in his head. A soft-faced Xandarian, prey to a bioshot which had burst his ribcage open and left his heart, huge and livid yellow, fluttering on exposed bone for hours. A tiny Badoon, starving themself until their scales flaked off and a guard tried to stomp them out of their misery - except he'd done it carelessly and they'd lain half crushed and moaning until the other kids finished the job. This one Krylorian girl, who'd injured her leg during training and kept it hidden from the overseers for weeks, until their pen stank of flesh-rot even above the stench they lived in usually. 

He remembered that one fairly often. Her and her stupid doomed bravery. It'd kept her alive for a few drudging weeks of agony, and earned her a meaningless final collapse in the dirt mid-assignment. She'd died with her veins raised swamp green; her jaw locked; her eyes blank. She'd been in the way. They'd crushed her under their boots like nothing. 

When Stakar had looked at him with approval for the dozenth time, after the glow had worn off and the dread had set in, he'd remembered her. When he'd told his exiled crew that they still worked to the Code. And now, when he was finally sitting in a cell on his own damn ship, waiting to be sent to the Kree for his reckoning, he could see her. Just staring away into the nothing, like always.

 Well, and what had he ever achieved by ignoring the rot? A name for his enemies to curse, that was all. Not like there was anyone left to care how Yondu Udonta died.

He’d be going back into that nothing soon enough.

 

* * *

 

 Sometimes, when Peter sings along to the mixtape, Meredith can see him so clearly.

She's been hanging on sound ever since she died. She heard her own death. She heard the long thin shrill of the heart monitor, and over it, Peter. Oh, Peter. She wanted to call to him but she couldn't; she couldn't reach his hand....

Then had appeared the proverbial light. She was floating among stars looking into it; thicker than she'd imagined, like it wasn't fully soluble in the dark, or it had a shape it was reluctant to let go of...and it dragged on her and her heart. She came real close to letting go.

 _Please,_ she said first, _please. Just let me see that my baby's alright. He's such a good boy, and he was so scared...._ And there was no answer but that steady pulling. There was something muffling about it. Her voice failed against its depthless silence. She wavered, and it tugged harder, and a shard of defiance broke out of her heart and stood between them. After all, she was surrounded by stars; there were many lights, and this one was being a little too familiar. 

So she told it, _No. I won't go with you._

That was about the time the Ravagers were taking Peter. 

The scarred captain had let him keep his headphones. Floating, resisting, she heard the familiar opening notes of Ohh Child, and once she had something else pulling on her it seemed easy to leave the light behind. She blinked and was at Peter's side. Her boy, huddled up on a cot in a small room, a blanket round his shoulders and her mixtape in front of him. His voice was wavering and thick with tears as he sung along, and her view of him wavered too; bright and then dark, colours washed out. She reached out to wipe the tears away, but her fingers filled with static as she brushed them against his face, and then...went through...

She withdrew quickly.

"Where's your Daddy, baby?" she whispered. "Why isn't he here?"

He should have come. A spaceship taking Peter away couldn't be a co-incidence, but this wasn't his ship and he wouldn't have left Peter to sit on his own and cry. 

_Ohhh, child, things are gonna get easier..._

The song ended and Peter went quiet, tears overflowing in his eyes again. She tried to reach for him - she couldn't -

 

* * *

 

 There's a lot of space in death. She cycles often through memories, each one playing out just a little bit falsely. 

Ego brushes her knuckles against his lips, looking coyly up at her. She smiles back. 

"Tell me again what it's like out there," she says, while the cosmos ticks by gently behind the cotton-candy clouds of sunset. She sees it reflect in his eyes; an infinity of pinpricked darkness. 

The first time, the real time, he'd spun her beautiful tales of the majesty of space and the civilisations which hurried and clattered and sung within it. This time, when he opens his mouth, all that comes out is, " _Brandy, you're a fine girl..._ "

She smiles at him, delighted into love, and replies, " _No. I won't go with you_."

 

* * *

 

She watches the scarred captain direct her boy through streams of alien pedestrians. Peter is whipping their valuables out of their pockets as they brush against him. He's humming. He's smiling. 

She watches his quick hands as other people’s belongings pass through them, and doesn’t know how to feel.

The scarred captain ruffles his hair and tells him he’s doing a good job.

 

* * *

 

She sings for herself sometimes too. Songs from the second mixtape, the one he's never opened. Songs she hadn't included on either. Bawdy songs they used to sing in the bar when it was late.

Once, she finds herself humming Never Been To Spain at the same time as the scarred captain whistles it, and she can see him clearly for the first time. He's slouched back in his chair, staring out the viewport. Lights flicker over his expressionless face. Experimentally, she swings a hand against his cheek, and is surprised to see him blink and wince slightly. She'd felt the raised lines of his scars on her palm, and her hand stings. 

Attempts to punch him on the nose and poke him in the eye don’t work out so well, perhaps because his whistling has faltered. Still, she hisses at him.

“Stop threatening my boy! Stop raisin' your hand to him and makin' him fight! Stop using him to sneak around in dangerous places an’ steal things you got no right to want!” She hesitates a moment there. She isn’t stupid. She knows Peter must be useful to be tolerated in a place like this. But he shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t be here at all. “Tell the  _truth_ ,” she says. “Why’d you take him? What’s his daddy gone and done?”

The captain’s face remains impassive under its flickering lights. After a moment, he starts up whistling again.

“ _I’ve never been to Spain, but I kinda like the music_.”

 

* * *

 

“ _Brandy, you’re a fine girl...._ ”

This isn’t a memory.

This is some shit, is what it is.

Ego, her Ego, her baby’s daddy, is standing over a tiny, limp form, and sadly humming _her_ song as he shakes his head.

Oh, he doesn’t look like her Ego – he’s a larger version of the little scrap at his feet – but being dead has given Meredith some ability to see, and she _knows_.

“ _Brandy walks through a silent town,_

_And loves a man who’s not around,_

_She hears him say,”_

“It’s important not to give up hope, Mantis,” Ego says, turning to the little girl shivering behind him.

After that, whenever she sees him in the waking dream which is her afterlife, his face is just a skull.

 

* * *

 

 “This is the sea.”

Her Peter is crying. He’s crying and she can’t reach him, and Ego’s fist crushes the walkman, and –

-the light is an ocean – 

 

* * *

 

 There wasn’t a whole lot of idle conversation in the pens, but there were a few whispered stories which twisted and turned from child to child. Some were about where they came from, about furious, fearsome parents who would track them down someday. Most were about the empire, and what happened out there in the quiet planes of dark between solar systems.

“That’s where you go when you die,” a boy whispered to Yondu as they huddled together for warmth one night.

“The souls of slaves go to the temples,” someone on his other side whispered back. “And the priests eat them so they can stay strong and full of the knowledge of war.”

“There’s a ship,” an older girl said, leaning in close. “A ship that’s harder to find than anything with the best cloakin’ of the empire. It flies around out there, and anyone who hails it just hears a thousand voices singing. Kids' voices. And if you try an’ follow it, you can get lost for years and years, ‘n’ all your maps and coms stop working. They say you only get to port once just before you all die too.”

She sounded entirely certain. Yondu looked up to the roof of the pen.

“Y’ really believes that’s true?” he asked.

“I hope so,” the girl said.

 

* * *

 

_Can’t find homeworld’s final gates; we stick around instead_


	2. Chapter 2

Ego’s death had rolled like a shockwave through the unformed afterlife of Meredith Quill. With it had come the stink of burning metal and a sudden return of weight to her free-floating latency. The fog had cleared in a surge of heat and light. Now there was a jumble of stars and planets scattered across the sky, and everything was bright and glittering. New. Even the canopy of space shone like a screen of amethyst.

The captain’s passing was much less dramatic, but it reshaped the world too. As soon as he arrived, a starship folded into place around him, and started flying in towards the brightest light at the centre of this system. Apparently the ship belonged to him even in death. It wasn’t particularly shiny, so she went straight to it.

“So you’re the boy's mama,” he said at last, when they were standing on the deck together.

“Yeah,” she said, and considered getting some closure on her desire to poke him in the eye. But she had the truth now. Besides, his eyes were still grey, and she was too sad to really be all the angry he probably deserved. “You hurt him.”

“That’s right,” he said. He just stood there looking at her, with something almost soft in his resignation.

“Never did catch your name,” she said. He blinked.

“Yondu Udonta,” he said, and then added, very quietly, “I’m sorry ‘bout all of it, Quill.”

She nodded, neutrally.

“We can talk about that. But for now...you wanna help make a deadbeat even sorrier?” she asked.

 

* * *

 

He hadn’t had much education in celestials before meeting Ego–it had been rumour and superstition at best, wistful thinkin’ elsewise. Of course every now and then you’d run into a cult for someone descended from the gods. They’d have some magic tricks he could grok after a month with Stakar, or the kind of fervent defining belief which birthed its own proofs. Nothin’ special. And there was Knowhere, which was mainly...just fuckin’ oddball, and never submitted to none of its own pretty legends.

All of the little half-breeds he’d couriered had seemed like normal kids. Even Ego had seemed...normal enough. A few hundred too many whelps, of course, but then they were the only kin available for him. Or so he’d said. Yondu hadn’t liked him or his affable charm, even back then, but he hadn’t seen a con in it either. Not at first. And he _had_ been looking. Stakar was right enough about him, but he’d been suspicious to start with. Then...surely it made sense, for Celestial children to go to a Celestial father; for the Celestial father to think them worth having. When Ego answered all his questions and still seemed to make sense, he’d let it go. He’d wanted the money. He’d wanted...

“No excuse,” he told the woman beside him, without quite knowing why. “But to start with I figured he felt off just ‘coz I didn’t much care for him or his l’il family ideal. For a god, he didn’t seem like anything, y’know.”

An echo of Ego turned to look at them through the viewport; blue-skinned, a proud fin flaring over his head. He smiled. “Expecting someone taller?” he asked.

When this had happened in life, Yondu had snarled at him until he’d changed form again. Now he looked at Ego’s simulation of his kin with consideration. “I used to wonder ‘n’ dream ‘n’ yearn ‘bout the strange things out there in the dark. Turns out, the highest form of life we know of is...some jackass like that.”

She laughed beside him.

“Yeah, he was a real disappointment,” she said. Then her jaw clenched.

“And Peter...”

“Boy’ll be okay,” Yondu said. “More worried ‘bout us right now.”

He’d never heard anything about how a Celestial died.

 

* * *

 

 

Yondu was pretty sure that it was Ego at the centre of this universe, but bits of him and Mama Quill seemed to be floating out here too, flung out on solar wind. The ship was racing in on some pre-set course, and on the way they would pass through...turbulence. Go burning through memories remembered wrong. The light had got inside them and twisted them about.

So here he is, having the battle-mask pressed on his face for the first time. It has little connectors on the inside that slide into the back of his neck and front and base of his implant. They hurt going in and hurt even more when they’re activated. The supervisors will use ‘em as punishment often, and, with slightly less frequency, as motivation. Don’t screw up; don’t get zapped again. Many of his predecessors have died from similar incentives, and it’s common for poorly-performing slaves to have spiderweb scars over their whole heads from prolonged electrocution.

The Master in charge of the outfitting turns it on for a moment, just to make sure it’s fully functional – he must not scream – the light – he can hear someone singing a long way off, but a voice much closer is saying, “Give in.”

He doesn’t choose to give in. He wants to get out, get even, to not be nothing...and that means living. So he wants to live.

But he can hear himself screaming anyway.

So here he is, watching Meredith Quill as she dances under the night to familiar terran music, a primitive audio device on the grass beside her. Her hair is falling out as she spins; one eye is glowing an eerie blue. He doesn’t think she can see him there, but as a matter of pure instinct he whistles a short snatch of one of the songs he has memorised from listening to Peter.

_I’ve never been to Spain, but I kinda like the music..._

She looks at him, both eyes blue and wide and horrified, but she goes on spinning away...

So here he is, in space for the first time in his memory, crouched in a corner and peering out the viewport. They keep flashing by what looks like the same planet; brightly coloured and beautiful, playing a single note over and over again.

 _Alone,_ the planets sing.

He shuts his eyes and imagines a better song.

So here he is, standing at Meredith Quill’s bedside as her hands spasm white on the sheets and a doctor hovers around her bent knees, waiting. Yondu has never been even slightly squeamish; he has seen the viscera of many women torn out; he has seen many, many dead children. But there is something unsettling about the blank suffering in Quill’s eyes; the halo of shed hair around her head; the tiny body the doctor gathers up. It should be Peter, but it isn’t. It’s a faceless, child-shaped mass of glowing blue.

Meredith Quill turns and locks eyes with him until he blinks.

So here he is, lying halfway in Stakar’s lap, and his blood is staining the sand in a wide circle around the two of them, and Stakar’s hands on his face are desperate.

“Just hold on,” Stakar keeps saying.

“Don’t wanna die here,” Yondu tells him. It’s important.

And it’s strange, but he can see two things happening at the same time in the same space, as though he’s passing through an echo. On one side, Stakar gently pushes him down onto the red sand.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” he says. “You’d have ended up disappointing me, you know.”

He understands that.

On the other side, Stakar clings to him helplessly, like he doesn’t even know how to let go. “I’m sorry, kid,” he’s saying. “I’m sorry. I know.”

“No,” Yondu tells him, ignoring the first side even though he knows it’s what should have happened. Because this here is important, he _remembers_ ; this had been the most important thing. “Idiot. Don’t wanna die _here._ C’n you take me back to the ship?”

Stakar blinks at him, fingers cold on his face, then hoists him into his arms and sets off at a flat run. The jolting hurts, but he feels...safe, maybe. Stakar smells like burnt plastic and hot metal and blood. His jacket is rough on Yondu’s cheek. Sounds are fading, but he’s sure they’ll get there in time. He’s expected to die on a battlefield all his life; now he expects to live just long enough to die at home.

Admittedly, once they _are_ there Aleta curses Stakar out for not knowing anything about Centaurian physiology, and everyone starts sticking things inside his open wounds and rattling medical equipment and shouting at each other, and it turns out, really noisily, that he’s gonna live after all.

He doesn’t feel so safe with that knowledge.

So here he is, once again watching Meredith Quill. This time she’s tucking their boy into bed, fussing over smoothing down his sheets to make him roll his eyes and smile.

“Mooom,” Peter whines. She laughs at him.

“Now,” she says. “Bedtime story.”

She plucks one of the books from the shelf and sits at the foot of the boy’s bed. Yondu squints at them. He’d told the boy night-stories himself from time to time, albeit violent ones livened up with threats to use Peter to demonstrate whatever nastiness he was describing if the brat interrupted again, but he’s never seen it formalised like this. The light is soft and it makes Meredith’s face glow with life.

“The Ugly Duckling,” she reads aloud. Yondu’s squint deepens. Damn weird name. Damn weird Terrans. Mind you...Tazerface had existed. Even Yondu wouldn’t put him in a children’s book, though.

“Once there was a little duckling who found it hard to make friends. All the other ducklings on the pond said they’d never play with him because he didn’t look right for a duckling. He wasn’t pretty like them.”

“Boys aren’t pretty,” Peter objects. Started the habit early, then.

“Boys can be beautiful,” Meredith insists. The softness on her face now looks like remembering. “They can be beautiful, and sweet, and love to plant flowers and watch them grow. Remember that, Peter.”

Peter acquiesces surprisingly easily. Meredith looks down at the book again.

“They were small and had yellow fuzz all over them, and he was large and grey. They called him ugly.

“Whenever the ducklings went to the barnyard, all the other animals agreed that this little duckling was wrong.

““You don’t belong here with us,” they all said. And that was true. The little duckling felt it too, right in his bones. He didn’t belong. He had a different destiny; one greater than the barnyard or the pond.”

Yondu shifts. Something is wrong here. Meredith’s face is fixed, fear in her eyes. She raises her voice even though the room is otherwise silent.

“As the seasons changed, the duckling looked less and less like his fellows. He grew larger and larger. All of them were shedding their old colours. The others were brown and blue and green. The ugly duckling was white: pure white. One day he saw another bird flying past. This bird was large and white too, and truly beautiful. He decided to follow, and the bird led him out a long way, to

- _the sea_ –

“A huge, shining lake. When the duckling went into the lake after the other bird, he saw his reflection and realised he too was beautiful. In fact, they were the same.

““Excuse me,” he said to the bird. “But what are we?”

““We are swans, Peter,” said his father. “We are the Lords of the Stars. I knew one day I would find you.””

Meredith’s grip on the book is white knuckled. Yondu curses to himself, and says,

“Quill!” as loudly as he can.

Both of them turn to look at him. Meredith’s eyes are glowing that uncanny blue. Peter’s are dark pits, round and empty and huge in his face. 

Yondu's voice dries up in his throat.

So here he is –

 

* * *

 

 

“Enough,” Yondu snapped, and staggered back into himself on the bridge of his prob’ly-a- metaphor ship, and took a moment to prob’ly-unnecessarily breathe. At his side, Meredith was running through some damn fine invective. _She_ didn’t seem to need to come up for air.

Eventually, though, she started to slow down.

“-no-good son of a ruttin solar prominence, you halfass twirl of Hawking radiation-”

 _Alone,_ cried the light, and pulled on them both.

“I don’t care,” shouted Meredith Quill. “You stay that way! Forever!”

_Alone!_

Yondu snarled. He could hear something else beneath the loudest voice, and it churned guilt in his chest. It was something from a story almost forgotten.

It sounded like a thousand children calling.

 

* * *

 

 

Once Meredith was a few months along with Peter, her daddy had finally got around to learning to hide his worry. They’d tottered onto pretending they were equally prepared for this baby. To celebrate, they’d further gotten into the habit of sitting out together, listening to the katydids sing the evening through. He’d drink beer and she’d drink lemonade and they’d talk only intermittently, but they’d both be listening the whole time – to the world; to each other. Those were good evenings. She’d felt at one with the whole universe back then. She’d looked up and known she wasn’t alone, would never be alone, and her baby wouldn’t be either.

“My little Star-Lord,” she’d murmured, resting her hands on her belly. She’d thought he’d have such an inheritance. Such a family.


	3. Chapter 3

 

_Can you hear us singing? We’re singing down your name_

_There’s a place for you among us_

_where all callings are the same…_

*

*

*

“Listen,” Yondu said, grabbing Meredith’s arm. The thin wail of Ego’s human sculpt sailed like a siren underneath his rumbling planetary voice, and Meredith growled. She didn’t want to have to listen to his bullshit ever again.

“Not to _him_ ,” Yondu said.

She stared at him, seeing the long shadow of a terrible guilt fall in his eyes. Some inkling of his meaning darted through her mind, and, as if her ears were sensitised by that instinct, she began to hear whispers threading through Ego’s clamour.

_Let us out_

_I want to go home_

_Mama…!_

“They’re trapped,” she whispered, horrified. Then she shook free of Yondu’s grasp and seized his arm in turn. “We have to help them!”

_Where am I?_

_Father, please…_

He looked at her grimly. “How d’you plan on that?” he asked, but she could hear in his voice that he was on-board, whether he wanted to be or not.

“I don’t…we could try…calling out to them.”

She walked slowly towards the console. “Does it have a transmission frequency?”

He caught up with her and hit a few keys. “Go ahead.”

“Children?” she asked falteringly. “Can…can you hear me?”

_River Lily?_

_Father’s River Lily?_

She shuddered. “No. My name is Meredith Quill. I’m here to help you.”

_Meredith._

Ego’s voice was stronger and more focused now.  _You came back._

“Not for you, asshole,” she said.

 _This is me._  She could see his face in her mind for the first time in forever. Young. Kind. She’d thought he was  **good**.  _All of this is me._

“No. The children?”

_They belong to me._

Yondu’s breath hissed between his teeth.

_Everything here does, River Lily. This, after all, is also a world of my creation._

Every word sent eddies of alien feeling through her. Pride. Possession. Was he pushing his thoughts into her head? She felt sick.

“Fucking Celestials,” Yondu said. “Can’t even die right.”

_Ah, Yondu. I thought I heard you there. I’m glad you could join us, but please. This is between me and Meredith._

“That right, Quill?” Yondu asked her. “You mind me butting in?”

“Knock yourself right out,” she said. “I got nothing to say to him. I never knew him.”

_And yet you’ve come to me, to be with me in death. Yondu and I died together, so perhaps he was drawn into my afterlife by coincidence, but you were far away…_

The foreign influence she could feel tugging on in her brain was pushing out splintered images now: a white manikin of herself; a rippling nothing where the face should be; her hands outstretched to Ego; the beginnings of a dance between them.

“Maybe I just wanted to kick your ass,” she said.

He laughed.  _Meredith._

Yondu smacked his hand down on the console and the transmission ended. 

“Don’t think that’s gonna work with him in the way,” he said. “Gotta think of somethin’ else.”

“This ship have guns?” she asked, nails biting into her palms.

He grunted. “’Course. But maybe not ones that’d function under, uh, these circumstances. Technic’ly this ship probably ain’t even existant.”

“You’re a lot of help,” she said. He gave her a flat look.

“You got any artillery yourself, Quill?” he asked.

She thought about it. All her life, she’d been more inclined to use words as weapons than actual violence. She was a good shot, but she hadn’t ever used a gun on another living being. The scraps she’d been in had mainly been resolved with a single well-placed boot to the instep or crotch. She’d bitten a boy when she was twelve. Most of all, her main defence had always been not caring what other people thought of her.

“I think I have what I need,” she said. He shrugged.

“Got an idea what might get me to the kids,” he said. “You think you can keep Ego busy?”

She raised her chin. “He owes me twenty-five years,” she said. “Is that enough time?”

“…Just might be,” he said.

 

* * *

 

The ship’s controls wouldn’t allow them to do anything but keep racing inwards. As it happened, further in was exactly where Yondu intended to go. The constant swirl of history which was catching at the back of his mind got stronger and stronger the closer to the centre of light they got.

At first he’d thought the memories were Ego’s projections: a deliberate assault on their minds meant to tear ‘em open for consumption. Now he wasn’t so sure. The ugliness of Ego’s intrusions didn’t seem to match the way the bastard pictured himself. Maybe it was just a quality of this shared halfway afterlife. Maybe that meant he and Mama Quill could meddle in it too.

Wasn’t likely to be fun, but that didn’t matter. He knew what he deserved.

He thought outwards with one of the memories he least wanted to touch, pushing it until the shame of it was numb and heavy in his chest, and he could hear that first child’s voice again. A little Sytorian boy who cried with the sound of a storm in a water pipe. He remembered hating hearing it, as he always did whenever any of the children made a fuss. Not out of compassion, not really, but because to some tiny part of him it still meant the Masters were coming to restore silence.

Nonetheless, he’d been at his most patient with that first child, squatting down and trying to get the boy to look at him.

“Here, kid,” he’d said. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you. We’re gonna take you to your daddy, see? He’s gonna take real good care of you.”

*

“I don’t want my father,” the boy wails. “I want my mother. Please, Mister Alien, take me back to my mother.”

Yondu sits back on his heels. “I wouldn’t be so hasty if I was you, boy. Your father, he’s somethin’ special. Can give you anything you want – food, toys, places to run around in.”

“I don’t want toys, I want-”

“Your Momma. I know.” He sighs and scratches at one ear. “You’re makin’ this difficult for yourself, but it don’t have to be. Your daddy’s gonna care for you better ‘n anyone else can. You’re special too, see? Same way he is. He’s gonna teach you about what’cha are. ‘Sides a momma’s boy, ‘coz that’s obvious.”

The boy at least stops crying and starts glaring. Yondu snorts. He doesn’t have the first fuckin’ clue what to do with kids, at least kids who come from the kind of softness this one has clearly been swaddled in, but the squashy offended face is almost kinda endearing. Irritating at the same time, but hell.

“You’ll be fine, boy,” he says. “Ravager’s bond. What’s your name, anyhow?”

The glare doesn’t waver, but the kid replies after a moment’s hesitation. “Dacktu. Son of Sithan.”

“Well, Dacktu, _son of Sithan_ ,” he says, replicating the emphasis with a twist of his mouth. “I’m the Captain here. This ain’t gonna be a long trip. You’re gonna stick by me, ‘cos my boys ain’t real used to hosting guests-”

- _never tasted terran before_  –

*

He blinked. He’d been about to rise, but instead he stayed down, staring into the boy’s angry face.

That was it.

“You really in there, boy? Dacktu?” he asked, softly. The boy looked at him for a moment in silence.

“I want my mother,” he said again, at last. His voice sounded very different this time. Thin and dry, like all the tears had burned out of it long ago.

Yondu shut his eyes. “That’ll be right,” he said.

 

* * *

 

“Do you remember when we first met?” Meredith asked Ego. “I was just a girl, you were just a predatory space marauder…those were simpler times, weren’t they?”

He laughed at her. He said -

[ _She’s sitting in an eternal green plain, watching for movement. Flowerheads spin like windmills over the gently waving grass. There’s a pattern taking shape out there, and it’s going to be beautiful._

_A little distance away, Peter is calling. He says he’s found something and he won’t tell her what it is. He says she needs to come and look for herself._

_When she tries to stand up, the world spins too. She can feel its progress through space, and her tiny pinned presence upon it, revolving into infinity._

_Peter’s voice deepens and changes until it’s Ego calling for her instead. “Come on! Come and see!”_

_If she doesn’t go to him, she knows, she’ll stay this small and helpless forever._ ]

Meredith clenched her teeth.

“Why are you calling for me? Didn’t you decide my part in your something greater was over? Are you saying you made a mistake?”

He laughed at her. He said -

[ _She’s standing by a river. There are lilies in the water, sweeping rapidly downstream. She tries to reach into the river and pull them out, filled with an alien desperation to salvage something from their beauty, but the instant she has a flower in her hand it flashes into flame. Soon her fingers are blistered thickly and her hands are shaking. The lilies in the water rot in front of her._

 _She turns away. It would be better to carve herself flowers out of stone, she hears herself think. That way they’d be real._ ]

It seemed so real. At least as real as a world in which her ghost was standing on a blue man’s imaginary spaceship, fighting with a vision.

Talking back was hard. Not losing herself was her only chance. She forced the words out and followed them forwards.

“Your expansion failed, didn’t it? My Peter and his friends stopped you.”

Ego said -

[ _He’s a man in this vision. Still young; still guileless. He’s looking at her with tears in his eyes. They’re on his planet – himself, she supposes – as it burns. The heat of it pushes at her, competes with the heat of fury in her chest. After only seconds, the ground falls out beneath them and they both tumble after it. They go crashing though a darkness which promises to be endless…._

_But then the light rekindles. It’s fainter. It seems distant even as it’s blazing through them. But it’s undeniably his. It bears her up, too._

_She sees herself, then, as he is seeing her. Still young herself, and bright with a delicate prettiness, like a crystal figurine filled with moonshine. Her expression is uncertain. Her hair is long._

_He says, “If I had realised there would be a world beyond, one in which we would both be immortal…everything would have been different.”_ ]

 

* * *

 

 

“How’s he keepin’ you here?” Yondu asked. Dacktu shook his head.

“There’s nowhere else to go,” he said. “Beyond father there is nothing.”

Yondu frowned. “How’d you know? You ever try to leave? See your Momma again?”

The boy raised his chin until he was staring Yondu full in the face. Something flared behind his eyes, a brightness much less powerful than Ego’s radiance, but focused so squarely on Yondu that he had to blink and look away.

“I don’t remember her anymore,” the boy said. “Only this. Only you, taking me away. Only my father killing us.”

‘Us’, he said. Yondu had just an instant to wonder why.

 

* * *

 

“Nothing’s different,” Meredith said. “You’re still alone.”

He was silent so long she thought perhaps he’d retreated. Then the ship shuddered violently, and the hull groaned with an almost human sound of dismay. Where the light they were flying into had been a sphere like the sun, stretching across the viewport, now it was twisting and unfolding into a giant. A great, gleaming hand was reaching out for them.

The ground lurched, and she stumbled sideways into a wall. A panel knocked loose.  It bounced off the floor with a clang.

Which surely wasn’t right, was it? The ship shouldn’t be so fragile. She turned to look at the damage and saw a sheath of paper spilling out of the hole. Scattered across the pages were a cohort of vividly coloured figures, as bright and essential as the shape Ego was choosing now. The ship jerked again, but she kept her balance, dropping to her knees instead to gather the papers to her chest.

They were Peter’s old crayon drawings.

 _Mom_ , as tall as the trees and the house he’d drawn her beside.  _Granpa_ , holding the hand of another  _Momey_ , this one with bright orange hair and two green dots for eyes.  _Barney dog_ , the old mutt who sat all day outside their local shop and was greeted ecstatically by a six year old Peter every time they saw each other.  _Aants_  and  _Uncles_  and the  _postman_. Each of them took up most of the page they were on unless Peter had drawn them holding hands with the other figures, or standing under particularly large suns. Occasionally there were red depictions of the artist interwoven with the others, most often beside  _Mom_ s or  _teecher_.

There was just one picture labelled  _Daddy_. He stood in a field of red flowers. When Peter was small, before her cancer, she hadn’t told him that his daddy was from the stars. She’d just said he came from far away, and he’d had to go back there, but that he loved them both very much, and one day…he’d return. She stared down at the picture, a laugh boiling in her throat.

“Fuck,” she said.

 

* * *

 

 

The field of bones was vast. It crossed the horizon on every side.  Low over the ground hung a thin, rust-coloured smog, corrosive and stinking and hot on his skin. When Yondu shifted his weight, the bones under his feet crunched, and he heard a trickle of something thickly liquid escaping.

There were thousands – tens of thousands – of children standing in the field. They were all looking at him. At a certain distance, all you could see were their eyes, blank and blue and glowing out of the haze.

“Shit,” Yondu said. Dacktu turned to stare at him too, irises bleached out by blue.

“You brought me to father,” he said. “Father keeps us here.”

Even after all his years of suppressing delinquent emotion, Yondu couldn’t prevent himself from shivering. The eyes were accusing. It smelled of the pens.

Slowly, the children started to move. The ones closest to him rearranged until they were a wall of familiar faces. He remembered each of them. The things he’d said; reassurances he’d half committed to; tears he’d rolled his eyes over. He remembered leaving them with Ego. Telling himself it wasn’t anywhere close to the worst fate they could have had. Ignoring the doubt which had needed the telling.

“You brought me here.”

“You brought me.”

“You left me here.”

“You promised.”

They advanced on him steadily. He stood frozen, feeling the smog pulse in his lungs.

“Please let us go.”

“Please let us go.”

“Let go!”

They reached him.

 

* * *

 

The blazing fist closed on the ship. Meredith closed her eyes.

“You know, I told him all these stories about you when he was small,” she said. “As he got bigger he didn’t like them so much. He was angry with you. Because you left me.”

Even behind sealed lids, her eyes burned.

_Once there was a little duckling._

“I told him you had reasons, and when he was older he’d understand. That you’d come back, and that was what mattered.”

_He was lonely because he was different. But he wasn’t alone. Not ever._

“I guess I made it pretty easy for you. I was so ready for the stars to love me the way I loved them, and there you were. A man who’d been looking out into those stars for so long he mistook them for himself. All the good things I believed about you…after a while I guess I was just making them up for Peter’s sake.”

_He loved his mother, and his grandfather, and even the remorseful fox which had hunted his kind once, though no longer._

_And he loved the stars._

“Meredith,” he said, voice no longer reverberating with power or echoing in her head. She looked up and there he was, standing on the bridge, young and human and smiling at her sweetly. “Meredith, I know from a mortal perspective my actions must seem monstrous. But you’re no longer so limited. Please, try to think about this from my point of view.”

_And one day he found other loves waiting. And the strength of them together helped him fly._

She looked down at the picture Peter had drawn of a hypothetical father in a big red field.

_His mother was very proud. And she knew that she could fly too. After all, she had her own loves under her wings._

“You had so long to figure out what was important and you never did. The only worthwhile things you were ever involved in makin’ were those babies, and you couldn’t even see them at all.” She shook her head. “You want to talk about limited? The face you’re wearing now… I made that up.”

_She flew._

On the very edge of the universe, the stars began to go out.

 

* * *

 

The world was full of grasping hands. They were icy to the touch. All at once, layered on top of each other, came a hundred visions of Ego’s face becoming distant and disappointed; a hundred layers of fluttering eagerness churning to fear as he turned away; a hundred flares of light. Then the fall of darkness. A hundred. Then another hundred. Another.

“Stop,” he rasped.

“Let us go!”

The bones were digging into him, piercing his chest, his belly, his spine. He tried to struggle and could barely manage the twitching of his hands.

The fog had grown thicker until it was almost a second night, hanging just over their heads. He looked at their lost, panicking faces, and felt desperate survival instinct scream in his throat. He forced himself to swallow.

He said, “Who did I steal you from?”

Something changed in the faces. One of them said, “My family.”

“My mother,” said Dacktu.

“My brothers.”

“My grandma.”

“My order.”

“No-one,” said one. “I had no-one. You promised me a someone and you lied!”

“He stole you from yourself, Mida,” said one of the girls closest to him. “He took your future.”

“I had a future!”

A babble of voices.

“Let us go!”

“I don’t even remember my name anymore.”

He forced his eyes open again and looked for the source of that voice. He wouldn’t have remembered either before this began.

“It’s Kaylan,” he said. “That’s your name, girl. I’m sorry.”

The sky was bright as amethysts. In it, a huge golden figure looked down at the speck in its fist.

At the very edge of visible space, the stars were going out.

The children looked up.

 

* * *

 

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Ego shouted.

“I’m Meredith Quill,” she said. “And I’m telling my deadbeat ex to get gone.”

The face she had known broke apart like dry sand, letting the glowing giant through. He drew back his fist –

And then froze, as something yellow-white erupted out of his chest. What looked like a twisted, sharp rib burst through his thigh. Fleshless fingers dug their way out of the place where his eyes should have been. He staggered sideways. The chorus of children’s voices rose to a howl –cries for freedom; wordless fury; names. Ego’s form convulsed as the children rose up around him, dragging their lost bones out of the air and stabbing them into their father as he screamed. Meredith had to shut her eyes, shuddering despite her hatred.

“Meredith!” he cried, but his voice was thin under the roar of his children’s, and she had nothing to say to him now anyway.

“LET US GO!”

Darkness fell.

 

* * *

 

Yondu lay curled on his side, watching bits of bone fade out of the field. Most of the children had gone from it too, though his head still rang with their voices. The only light remaining was coming from the Eclector as it gently streamed on overhead.

It was almost something like peace. The same peace which had been on him as he died; after the cold had locked into him and the fading of his thoughts had quieted his agony. Peter’s face; Peter’s cheek against his palm. Peter; alive. Peace.

But it wasn’t over yet. He knew that right down in his own bones. Most of the children were gone, but there were still a few, scattered across the field. Some of them were crying.

He wondered where Meredith Quill was. Almost certainly she’d be better at this. These kids deserved better than just Yondu Udonta and the dark.

But that was what they had.

He got to his feet and went to the first child. They weren’t one of his, though he’d failed them nonetheless. He crouched in front of them.

“I don’t want to fight,” they said. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to. I just want to go.”

“So, you don’t gotta fight,” he said. He wasn’t sure it was even true. It had never been true before. He could see that it  _ought_  to be. Looking at the tears dribbling off their chin. Feeling that old fear.

They shuddered and looked up at him. “’’m scared.”

“I can see that,” he said.  Gingerly, he reached out and touched their face, brushing away the dampness on their cheeks. Just seemed to make them cry more, but he understood dimly that that might be a necessity.

At his hip, the arrow glowed red. The child looked down at it. He could see fascination finally start to displace some of the fear. Typical fuckin’ kid. Ghost kid. Whatever. 

He whistled the arrow out for them with a quick trill, and had it turn a loop the way Peter had liked watching, once. And again. And again; the designs becoming more complex as he drew them. Spirals. Ships. Cities.

The last tear dripped away from the child’s chin.

 

* * *

 

Meredith had tried to reach into the crowd of children, tried to help somehow, but she’d found nothing solid to touch. Just the feeling of gauze and air between her fingers. Just the feeling of loss and the fresh blood of hope in her chest. Ego was barely glowing at all anymore, and he was finally silent, struggling with something she couldn’t see. The once glittering sky had lost all its grandeur. There were no planets. No moons. No stars. Just Yondu’s ship and the emptiness.

She thought maybe she’d done that, somehow.

There was a soft thud as Ego fell forward onto his knees. He was still looking at her. Skeletal remains slowly burned away from him in bursts of feeble light. He opened his mouth to make some plea, some demand, but then stopped. 

Very softly, she told him, “They’re gone. You’re alone.”

His skin turned the white-grey of ashes. She expected him to flake apart and blow away, spent, but instead he remained on his knees in front of her, and stared and stared until she heard footsteps from behind.

“Ego,” Yondu said at last. “What the hell you doing on my ship?”

His arrow was a long cherry stripe against the dark.  When it returned to his holster, there was no more light left, only silence.

 

* * *

“Is it over?” Meredith asked eventually.

“Kids are gone,” Yondu said. He walked to the control panel and flicked a few buttons and switches. The emergency lamps came on. Besides the two of them, the bridge was empty.

“That sorry bastard,” she said. He just nodded. “There were…so many.”

Yondu cleared his throat. “Had a long time to produce ‘em.”

“Then they were stuck here all that time.” She uncrossed her arms and curled her fists.

“Not sure it works like that,” he said, straightening. Everything ached. “You feel like you been lost out here for twenty years?”

“Can’t tell,” she said, then hesitated. “No, you’re right. I can’t tell.”

“Good. ’Coz I’m feelin’ a thousand.”

“Well, maybe that’s just what you deserve,” she said, without hostility. He shrugged.

“Could be.” He wasn’t gonna get the rites either way. Not like he had anywhere else to be.

“Do you think there’s any way back?” she asked, as if she’d seen the thought on his face. She looked like she planned to claw her way back to her son’s side whether the afterlife had approved a route or not. Yondu snickered. Couldn’t say he disagreed with the feeling, much as he knew it wasn’t possible.

Hell, he was so damn tired.

“Maybe,” he actually did say. For her, maybe.

“I used to be able to see him when he sang our music,” she said. Her tone was almost confessional. “But this is deeper in…wherever we are. Ego’s ghost emporium. And his walkman’s gone.”

“He ain’t forgetting ‘coz of that.”

“No, but…” She pulled a face. “It was important. Tangible. And… _he_  was the one who destroyed it. You know?”

“’f it comes to it…” he gestured out into the beyond. “Assumin’ it’s over…you got anywhere else to go?”

“Oh…heaven, I suppose,” she said. “What about you?”

Yondu just snorted. He turned to look out the empty viewport, taking in all the nothing he had to look forward to.

 

* * *

 

In the very centre of the nothing; the deadest of dead centres, a tiny spark breathed. It was silent. It had no stars to see, and never would.

 

* * *

 

And then the colours bloomed.

Yondu stepped back again, eyes wide.

It was impossible. Stakar would never; he’d made that damn clear. Yondu had accepted it, he had; he had known he’d never be forgiven. He’d damn well died and that hadn’t been enough for the universe, there’d been all this other Celestial bullshit, he  _knew_  what he deserved.

Damn it.

Damn it…

That  _sentimental bastard_.

The fireworks spread across the length of the dark and hung there like navigation points. The gravity of Yondu’s heart reversed itself without his permission, yearning its way of the box he’d kept it in for years.

No. It wasn’t possible. It was a trick, or a joke, or a dream.

He closed his eyes.

They’d never thawed. Now the ice was seeping out of them. It went sloughing down his face in thick messy trails, catching in his lashes. Rubbing at the tears hurt. He had to wait the melt out, until it was dripping free and warm from his chin.

“It’s beautiful,” Meredith said softly. She glittered when he looked at her with wet eyes. Colours danced across her face. Her expression of wonder was much like her son’s.

Fine. Fine. He didn’t deserve it, but she was standing there seeing it too, the mother of the last child he’d done wrong by. Peter’s beloved Mother; the one  Yondu’s son sang to.

And suddenly he was sure she could go back too. Keep watching her boy like she ought to have been able to do freely all this time. He could help save Peter his mother as some kinda payment for losing him two damn inadequate fathers in one day; for forcing him to miss her funeral – for everything.

Let Ego be really, truly alone in himself for good.

“Boy barely used to talk about you,” Yondu said. The words came rushing out like they were thawing too. “Only time he’d bring you up was when he was talkin’ about that music of yours. Your taste was the best, he said.  I remember when we first got the translator in him an’ he told me what his walkman thing was. He said it was yours and you was dead and it was the most important thing still in the universe. I didn’t get it then, but he was so hung up on you I wondered sometimes what you was like. Like him, I figured. Anyway.” He coughed. “Got the boy some new earth music. Think you’ll like some of the shit on there. Thought so when I got it. Expect the boy’ll think so too, when he listens. ‘S how he talks to you. Don’t think that’s likely to change.”

She looked at him, tears shimmering in her eyes. The fireworks shone across her face. All the colours. He tried to smile, and found it surprisingly easy.

“Called a Zune. Seller said it’s got 300 songs on it.”

“300 songs?!” said Meredith Quill.

* * *

Both of them heard the music.

-

-

-

_All quiet at the ending from which the darkness came._

 


End file.
